


A Bromance or: How Clint and Natasha Learned to Open Up and Love Their Team

by prettyasadiagram



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-30
Updated: 2012-03-30
Packaged: 2017-11-02 18:01:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyasadiagram/pseuds/prettyasadiagram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Clint can't speak Russian and Natasha can make croissants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bromance or: How Clint and Natasha Learned to Open Up and Love Their Team

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I know nothing of Hawkeye’s background. In my head, Natasha and Clint have this bromance because they’re both stealth.
> 
> Thanks to thatdamneddame, who keeps contaminating me with feelings and encouraging plot-bunnies.

See, here’s the thing: people look at the Avengers and they see Steve with his dinner-plate sized biceps and Tony with his arc reactor, Thor’s flowing locks and sizeable hammer and Bruce slowly transforming into Hulk. But all Clint has is his bow, and Natasha only has her myriad of violent skills.

People forget that before the Avengers, Clint and Natasha were just regular field agents. Granted, they were classified field agents, but they weren’t part of a team. They had no one for a long time, and then they had each other.

 

\---

 

Clint first runs into her when he’s on mission in Russia, the leather outfit and scarlet red hair kind of a giveaway. It’s balls cold and they’re standing knee-deep in snow on opposite sides of the street, staring at each other in surprise. This was supposed to be simple surveillance, an easy mission.

Now it’s Clint’s bow against her admittedly impressive gun.

He tries to reason with her. “я говорю чуть чуть по русский.” [*]

She bares her teeth, “No, you don’t,” and fires.

Goddammit.

 

\---

 

The second time is two years later, also in Russia, still balls cold, but at least he’s inside this time. He’s posing as a financial analyst, trying to get close enough to a suspected weapons dealer to track the money trail. He sees her walking down the hall, slim pencil skirt and heels that he’s pretty sure can and will double as a knife the second she catches a glimpse of him.

He’s right, and that usually never happens.

She sees him, smacks her hand on the fire alarm on the wall, and pushes—let’s call him Boris, but to be honest he doesn’t really count—behind her, barking an order to “Go.”

(Agent Coulson’s voice is in his ear, “Barton? Report—Never mind, we’re sending in a team. Get to the extraction point.”)

Well, at least this time he has a gun.

He keeps a hold of said gun for about 3.5 seconds, holds his own for about five minutes, but this lady is clearly missing some essential vertebrae that everyone else has, if the way her foot almost breaks his nose from over her shoulder is any indication.

He’s pinned a minute later, her stiletto heel (goddammit, he totally called it) at his throat. “If it isn’t the little man who doesn’t speak Russian.”

Clint wheezes. “Usually I wait till the third date for this kind of full-body contact.”

“I’m a modern girl. We like to move fast.” She smirks. “Now, in the interest of saving time, I’ll ask you once before breaking your arm. What are you doing here?”

“The name’s Clint, sweetheart.” He coughs as she pushes a little harder with her heel. “This is where—ugh—where you reciprocate.”

(He hears Coulson sigh. “Since you seem to be unable to rescue yourself, we’re coming to you. Try not to let her break anything too important.” Clint smiles; Coulson has the best long-suffering sigh out of all his handlers.)

She raises an eyebrow at his grin and tightens her grip before the sound of large and probably well-armed men running makes her turn around. HQ must of amped up response time. Good to know.

Turning back to Clint, she smiles suddenly, “Natasha,” and then punches him in the temple.

Dazed, he props himself up on one elbow, watches her run down the hall and hoist herself gracefully into an air-vent. All this in a skirt. Nicely done.

He waves off assistance from the indeed large and definitely well armed men, running his tongue over his teeth as he mutters “Natasha” to himself. Suits her.

 

\---

 

After that, Clint runs into Natasha every now and then. Well, he says, “runs into,” but mostly he means that he catches a glimpse of her ever-red hair as she walks through a doorway, usually after irrevocably messing up his cover story. His mission completion rate has gone down the drain since he had the dubious pleasure of “running into” her.

That all changes when he walks into SHIELD HQ and sees Natasha walking down the hall toward him, Coulson at her side.

“Coulson, did you bring me a present? Is it Christmas already?”

“Agent Barton, I have some paperwork with your name on it, if you have nothing better to do.”

“Don’t lie, Coulson, you know I bring a smile to your face and a song to your heart.”

“That’s not a smile; it’s a grimace.” Coulson nods toward Natasha. “I trust you remember Agent Romanov.”

“I often think of our second date. You felt me up, but didn’t put out.”

Natasha smirks, inclines her head. “Agent Barton, good to see you again.”

He stares her down. “Last time I saw you, you punched me in the head.”

“Well, you were hitting me on.”

“Fair enough.” Clint shrugs in acknowledgement.

Coulson interrupts. “As scintillating as this conversation is, Agent Romanov has some forms left to fill out.”

Clint watches as they walk down the hall, mouths “scintillating” to himself in bemusement.

 

\---

 

Natasha and Clint work well together, as unlikely as it might seem.

Coulson still heaves heavy sighs whenever Clint talks back on the comms, but he sees Natasha’s lips quirk when he makes a particularly snarky comment. It’s progress.

Surprisingly, things get a bit easier after a mission they’re on goes bad.

Someone feeds them bad information on the guard schedule, so it’s totally not their fault, but they’re still the ones hauling ass to get the package and get out before everything goes on lockdown.

Natasha’s moving silently down the hallway, still flexible as always, but even she’s not invincible, so when a guard gets a lucky punch in, snapping her head back, Clint puts an arrow in his throat, even though he knows Natasha can handle herself.

She turns briefly and her lips twitch. He tips his head in return.

And so it goes.

 

\---

 

Four years later, Coulson calls them into his office. There’s a black man with an eye patch sprawled in a chair. Clint wonders how he got it. Paperwork accident? Played with BB guns as a kid?

“Barton, Romanov, this is Director Nick Fury.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

(Turns out, Fury doesn’t take kindly to questions, even joking ones, about what happened to his eye, if the unimpressed, one-eyed glare Clint gets is any indication.

When they’re out of earshot from Coulson’s office, Natasha turns to him and solemnly says, “I would’ve gone with tiger attack instead of freak knitting accident. He probably wouldn’t have looked so constipated.”)

 

\---

 

They have a week to decide, and, sitting in his drab government-provided apartment on his crappy twin bed, Clint is inclined to say yes. He isn’t particularly attached to these four gray and undecorated walls, Coulson would go with them, so there’s nothing keeping him here, except Natasha.

Natasha doesn’t bother to knock when she enters, but she sits quietly next to him on the bed. They don’t talk for a long, both of them staring at their clasped hands between their knees.

“It won’t be like it is now. This is nothing we were ever trained for.” She doesn’t look at him.

Clint laughs. “I was getting bored here anyway.”

 

\---

 

So the Avengers Initiative happens, and that’s pretty sweet, but being a secret agent is hard. No friends, limited communication with what little family one might have left, a thankless job with no public appreciation—well, not until the Avengers. Then it’s public all the time.

Before the Avengers, Clint and Natasha managed the best they could: they had a ritual for post-mission relaxation. It used to involve sparring, which never ended well for Clint, and then it switched to board games, which Clint always lost.

(To this day, he swears that somehow Natasha switched the cards in Clue, because there is no way that Colonel Mustard didn’t hang Professor Plum with the rope in the library. No way.)

After they join the Avengers, the board games are eventually replaced by baking. It’s perfect: no one loses and there’s baked goods for everybody at the end, as opposed to bloody noses.

But before Clint and Natasha retreat to baking, Steve suggests a bonding activity for the team.

 

\---

 

Like Bruce says, they’re a time bomb, not a team. At least, they are until Steve starts Poker Night.

Well, it starts out as Poker Night.

Thing is, Bruce can’t play much, gets his blood pressure up, and Tony is actually kind of a sore loser. But Steve, Steve can play. Turns out, Captain America has a poker face like you wouldn’t believe; that, or his lack of wrinkles gives him an unanticipated edge. But once again, Tony? Takes loss as well as Bruce would if he were tazed in the balls. That is to say, not well.

Thor doesn’t quite understand all the rules, but he loves yelling, “Raise!” Playing with him is kind of like playing a high stakes game of Bullshit with a toddler who doesn’t understand the rules, but insists on playing anyway. As for Natasha? She plays to win.

 

\---

 

Poker Night happens only once, and it ends with Steve’s shield stuck in the ceiling and Hulk destroying one of Tony’s three game rooms.

It was decided by the higher ups—mostly Pepper, who was tired of single-handedly funding half of the contractors in the New York area—that the team should find another way to bond that wouldn’t end in violence and Tony pretending not to cry because he lost to Steve. Again.

They decide to try Blind Man’s Bluff.

 

\---

 

“I do not see why we had to stop playing that Midgardian game of tricks. I enjoyed it very much. This one is much less exciting.” Thor somehow manages to still look regal with the King of Hearts stuck on his forehead

“Well, big guy, someone couldn’t remember the rules of the game. This one’s simpler.” If Tony sounds snappish, it’s because he is. He looks ridiculous and is losing. Badly. He’s rocking some crazy eyes through his yellow-tinted glasses and his hair looks like Darcy came after him with her taser like she’s been threatening to do if he keeps stealing all of Jane’s poptarts.

Thor sighs, breath ruffling the folded-up strips of paper that are on the table. “But there is no thrill! What do I need with—” he picks up one of the strips, “—Natasha’s Easy Bake Oven? I do not wish to bake.”

Clint turns to Natasha. “That confident? I know how much you covet that thing.”

(He’s not even being sarcastic, is the sad thing. The last time he “cast aspersions” on her collection of bizarre 90s toys, she uploaded clips of their sparring sessions, most of which ended with him getting his ass handed to him, and sent them around via the inter-office e-mail. It was a hard week. He’d had to buy her a limited edition Queen Skyla Sky Dancer toy to make peace. Fucking embarrassing.

He’s also bluffing. She has the Ace of Hearts sticking to her forehead.)

She flicks her eyes up to look at his card. “I have a good feeling.”

 

\---

 

Clint has the two of Diamonds.

Natasha grins as she pulls her winnings toward her.

Tony declares that she must have cheated, and the night devolves from there.

(Pepper declares that henceforth, Game Night is only to happen once a month and with adequate adult supervision—namely, her, Coulson or Rhodey.)

 

\---

 

So, it’s not that they’re hiding the baking from the team, they’re just being cautious. Discrete. Circumspect.

(Coulson subscribed Clint to a Word-a-Day site. It’s impossible to get his email off the list, but it has some perks. The other day he used “circumlocution” properly in a sentence and enjoyed the bemused look on Coulson’s face.)

The point is, the other Avengers were welcome to join in, if they found them.

Which Bruce does.

 

\---

 

They’re using Tony’s second kitchen, the one in the back of the mansion on the third floor, the one they found their first night staying in the mansion, when they hadn’t yet settled into the noises of the house. It’s spacious, certainly less gaudy than the main kitchen, but it’s fully stocked and that’s what matters, because tonight they’re making tequila peach pie.

Working with dough isn’t Clint’s thing: for all his patience on stakeouts and missions, he doesn’t have the inclination to make what he bakes pretty. All he wants is something edible.

(Natasha, on the other hand, loves it. Once, during a rare weekend off, he watched her make croissants. Fucking time consuming, all that rolling and refrigerating, but the end result was worth it.)

Tequila peach pie is perfect: Natasha deals with the dough and Clint pours them tequila shots while cutting up the peaches.

When Bruce walks in, they’re on their fifth celebratory shot and the pie is in the oven. Natasha has a bit of flour in her hair; Clint has a lime wedge between his teeth like a smile.

“This... is not what I was expecting.” Bruce looks amused.

Natasha just wipes her hands on her apron. “What were you expecting?”

“I thought there’d be more blood, for starters.”

Clint spits out the lime and props his elbows on the table. “So how’d you find us?” 

“The whole house smells like peaches. Also, Jarvis. ”

“Jarvis, you traitor.”

“My apologies, Agent Barton. I was unaware this was supposed to be a clandestine baking event. Perhaps next time you can bake when everyone else is asleep.”

The oven beeps and they all turn to stare. Natasha pulls on a pair of kitten oven-mitts and pulls out the pie.

Bruce looks at it. “Anyway, I was sent as an ambassador; the rest of the team was afraid they’d be forcibly removed if they came to see what was going on. But it smells good, and they’re curious.”

Clint tilts his head at Natasha. She raises an eyebrow and smiles back.

 

\---

 

(Steve tries to bake some cookies one night when most of the team is out barhopping, but they come out simultaneously burned and undercooked. Tony walks into the kitchen as the fire alarm goes off and immediately begins laughing: Steve is staring bewilderedly at the smoking baking sheet, the kitten oven-mitts on his hands.

After the fire department leaves, the team decides it’s for the best if they leave the baking to Clint and Natasha.)

[*]  
Translation: I speak a little bit of Russian.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do not repost this work in its entirety or share this work on third-party websites such as Goodreads.


End file.
